During the processing of poultry, such as chickens, turkeys, ducks, and other similar types of birds, through a poultry processing facility, multiple conveyor lines are often utilized to carry the birds through a series of work stations wherein the birds are defeathered, decapitated, eviscerated, and cut-up for packaging and shipment to market.
The multiple conveyor lines and their associated work stations perform an array of automated operations on the birds that are designed to process the birds in a quick, efficient, and uniform manner. In addition, such automated processing operations reduce safety risks to operating personnel and lower overall labor costs.
To minimize labor costs as well as to process the birds quickly and efficiently, it is desirable to perform as many of the cut-up and processing operations as possible with automated processing equipment with a minimum of manual handling of the birds. However, because the different conveyor lines of different processing lines are often configured differently according to the operations performed by the processing lines, it is sometimes difficult to transfer the birds efficiently between conveyor lines. For example, some conveyor lines, such as the cooling line, space their shackles six inches apart as the birds are carried by the conveyor, while other conveyor lines, such as the cut-up line, space their shackles twelve inches apart. This disparity often creates problems in the process of automatically transferring the birds from one conveyor to next.
In the past, the transfer of birds from one conveyor line to another was primarily manually performed by operators unloading the birds from the shackles of one line and reloading them on the shackles of another line. Such a manual method of rehanging birds is slow, inefficient, and labor intensive.
More recently, automated machinery has been developed for transferring birds between conveyor lines. An example of such an apparatus is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,813,101 of Brakels et al. However, such an apparatus does not appear to be able to transfer birds between conveyor lines having different spacing between shackles.
Accordingly, a need exists for an improved method and apparatus for automatically transferring birds from one suspended conveyor line to another suspended conveyor line within a processing facility.